Part 1  Mr FishEyes
by windwaltz410
Summary: When Rhombus Hills High is plagued by a swarm of computer bugs, Mr. Fish-Eyes comes to the rescue  two-part .
1. Part 1  Mr FishEyes

Mr. Fish-Eyes

A Retelling of

**The Pied Piper of Hamelin**

We called him Mr. Fish-Eyes because his eyes were always glazed over, as if he were seeing Something. Something that no one else could see. The principal called him Mr. Hud, because she was obliged to, but once I heard her saying to Mr. K in passing, "_That__Man_ is coming." She said _That__Man_ in capitals and italics – and one could hear the disgust with which she _infused_the phrase. The teachers, similarly plagued by a sense of duty, said, "Mr. H" before him, and before us, but among themselves he was, "Mr. Pest-Control."

And it wasn't mere pests which he dealt with. It was _computer_bugs – the mystical viruses by which, in a single epidemic, 500 computers could be dispatched – the pests which could frustrate even the might of a network, fortified by the expertise of Mr. Q, Mr. U, and Ms. S, joint heads of the –Tronics Department . It cost each of them a hundred brain cells to wrestle, much less triumph, over a single pestilence. Even Mr. Q, head of the –Tronics Department, had once decreed in the School Newsletter that - "the ever-increasing intelligence of the great bugs of this Age has baffled every member of the –Tronics team, and despite desperate measures undertaken on our part to extinguish, once and _forevermore_, these _pests__ – _no, these_monsters,_we continue to experience monthly pestilences, monthly torment, during which the diligent –Tronics team, including Mr. U, Ms. S, and myself, are compelled to suffer for a protracted period of time, namely a period of two weeks, in which the children of our school are prevented from exhausting the Great Scope of resources which the computer, and the computer only, makes available to them, the children of Rhombus Hills."

Mr. Q. had never learned the meaning of _concise_.

The computer bugs seemed to have savage two-week fits per month; and in those two weeks we suffered. The teachers who had once granted us computer sessions in the hope that we would "exhaust" the Great Scope gave us book-work instead; and we, who exhaust our "Great Scope" in ways never anticipated by the –Tronics team, missed what we had lost. And because the two-week periods were never predictable, precious Microsoft Word Documents disappeared in the thousands. Then the –Tronics team issued yet another statement in the newsletter about the importance of the USB in "successfully easing this crisis in which we, as a resilient community, must stand, and triumph." Students must come to school armed with a USB. Or students must have hardcopies of their work always at hand. It was almost like the "Sun-Smart" policies which they have at other schools. "If not in possession of a hat, student will be given an automatic detention." Except, in this case, it was a USB.

The result – school paper supplies diminished at a rate of a thousand sheets a day, and the Detention Room was always full – even, overflowing. Of course, the morale of the school suffered, too. The year-level coordinators murmured about the number of hours they had to spend in a Detention Room – next door to the ladies' toilets, in which the stench had really got out of hand. The school was spending so much money on the –Tronics team efforts that they had little left for_other_ things. We breathed rebellion – against I.T. teachers who had resorted to reading from ten-centimeter thick textbooks about "How to Combat the Bug", or "How to Effectively Extinguish the Pest," or "How to Deal with the Pestilences of the 21st Century: Technically Speaking" – against history and English and geography teachers who booked all our classes in the library where we kept company with yellow-eared tomes that must have been retrieved from the grave…

And then, Rhombus Hills, for the first time in a year, saw _the__light_!

In the form of Mr. Fish-Eyes.

No one, not even the resourceful –Tronics team, anticipated _him_, of all things. _That__Man_, _Mr.__Fish-Eyes,__Mr.__Pest-Control,_ in the General Office. We had seen many modest, colourless, specimens of I.T. personnel, in black suits and spectacles, in our time; men who had come - and gone, in despair – until the Powers that Be learned that the Pestilence at Rhombus Hills was incurable, and the I.T. personnel ceased to come. I think that is why the –Tronics Team decided that Mr. Fish-Eyes _would__do_. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Instead of the I.T. personnel, a quite _striking_ character. "Really – really quite remarkable, don't you think, Ms. G?" quoth Mr. Q in our hearing, to our History teacher. His eloquence, like everything else at Rhombus Hills, diminished.

Mr. Fish-Eyes, tall and rainbow-clad, bearing not a briefcase, not credentials, not some modest attempt at a Cure, but – but a beret. A little, rainbow-coloured beret, like everything else which he wore. He himself was a hodgepodge of _something_. The rainbow was not some neat arrangement of colour, but an explosion of it - splattered and _splodged_ rainbows, over his length, and width, and breadth. The hodgepodge was not merely in the colour, but in the style of dress – some parts of his rainbow-coloured coat, worn threadbare; some parts in tatters; in some parts, gone sadly to rags, such as the shoes on his feet, which were bound together by masking tape alone. And his face was a striking one. Very dark, and vividly coloured, with eyes fish-like in their large, round,_moist_ appearance. It was a _strange_face. I think it was a nice face, if one forgot the really absurd coat and shoes and fish-eyes – and yet there was something ugly in its hard lines. He was old – we could see it, in the way in which he looked at us, with his strange, _wise,__eighty-ish_, eyes - and yet, yet he was young, because an eighty-year-old does not walk, rainbow-coloured into the General Office, with a_beret_ instead of a briefcase, and a speech where his predecessors had resumes handy.

"I can fix it," he said to Ms. D, who for once had no answer. We quoted him for a week afterward.

A rainbow-coloured version of Bob the Builder? Maybe.

Ms. T. was drawing her_tenth_ map of Australia when we first saw him. We were in a computer room, of all places; and of all times, the school's provision of markers had decided to _diminish_. And yes, the library was booked out.

Ms. T. grunted loudly, aimed her eleventh marker at the bin - and missed. We returned to texting under the table – to cast longing looks at the computers, which were, of course, in a comatose state – to murmur among ourselves about the famous Fish-Eyes, whom none of us had seen, but all of us heard –

"Don't talk," said a voice from the door. "I'm listening for the bugs."

It was the kind of voice you don't forget. A_beautiful_ voice. The kind of voice Martin Luther King must have had, except greater – I think, greater with _passion._It was a voice many-coloured like himself; a voice which made you look up – and_listen_.

We looked – and listened with one accord, and we saw him. We saw a lean, rainbow-clad Mr. Hud, fish-eyes unblinking as he moved into the room; moved, like a dancer, like he was winging through air, light-toed, silent – _listening_. His body, tensed, trembling beneath the rainbow-coat; listening for Something which _we_could never hear – his weird, glazed eyes, looking for _Something_.

Mr. Fish-Eyes if you choose to call him so, stopped. Ceased to quiver, to pace, to _move_ at all. And we, too, were still. It was like he had cast a spell on us; like he had charmed us into silence.

Because even Ms. T. – ceaseless Ms. T - ceased to move, and ceased to speak!

His eyes changed then. Changed so that the glaze passed from them; and we could see that they were haunted. Haunted, _troubled_ with searching.

He opened his mouth, his eyes clear, no longer fish-like, and began to hum. A dim, dull kind of sound which grew, swelled into a Song without words –_soared_ into Something. The kind of Something which I can't describe because _everything_ pales beside It. Something for which you couldn't find a word in the English dictionary, or in Ms. G's vocabulary, for that matter, which could describe it to the letter. Something like promise. The promise of a million wonderful, absurd things. He was promising us an eternity of summer holidays. An eternity of _free_ computer-time. An eternity of living _without_ geography classes –_without_ Ms. T's ceaseless voice. Without the itty, nitty, _gritty_things of life. It was as if he found all those things, in that moment. Found Promise. Found that Something, for which he had always been searching. As if he was seeing them with eyes suddenly clear – seeing that great Land where life was as he had promised us. Wonderful, and _absurd_.

We would have gone with him if we could. Gone with Mr. Fish-Eyes to the proverbial 'ends of the earth' to seek that Something - on pain of death.

Mr. Fish-Eyes' voice could do that to you.

But the song ended, of course. Like everything else.

It ended – dived into silence – dived into hushed air; and then it was no longer hushed, but loud with the sound of a rising; a rising of a great swarm of _bugs_. An uneasy kind of sound, like the legendary nest of disturbed or, worse still, displaced wasps; like the evacuation of a thousand lip-licking flies from a true-blue Aussie BBQ.

The computers were rising from paralysis. Each and every one of them. And the sound within them, the sound of bugs panicking in flight, rose into the hush. We were all expecting a Ms. T tirade, a lusty belting out of, "Enough!", but she, too, was in a trance. It was a strange transformation – screens blue in a uniform coma, shivered once; shivered as if in waking, as if in realization. And then life. Word by word, pixel by pixel the "log-in" page blinked itself awake, while the sound moved – no, oozed from a hum, to a murmur, to silence.

Mr. Fish-Eyes had sung the bugs to death – and the computers to life.

"They're dead," he said slowly. His voice was dull, dazed, as if he had done something which he could not understand, and his eyes were once more glazed, fish-like.

Ms. T.'s mouth moved, worked in the motions of speech. But no sound came out of it.

So Ms. T. stood, very deliberately, and with her fingers, demolished Australia. We laughed at the destruction of a Great Bight which had worked its way several thousand kilometres inland since it was last charted. Nervous, shaken laughter, but laughter all the same. I don't know how we dared to, in view of Ms. T.'s _methods_. But today she took no notice of us – she did not flare, storm, or speak, as she liked to do, often, and at length. She only pressed her lips together and suffered. In blissful silence.

And then, in the bare space where Australia had been, she wrote with her last whiteboard marker, "Computer time for therest of the period." The closest, of course, that any teacher from Rhombus Hills had, or will ever, come to an admission of _defeat_.

And Mr. Fish-Eyes? The one who had worked the magic?

He was gone, like he had come. And somehow that Something went with him. That Something which had shut our lips - and Ms. T.'s. For which we will always be grateful.


	2. Part 2  An Epilogue in Clippings

_An Epilogue in Clippings_

**To the Rhombus Hills Police:**

_By Mr. Q, head of the –Tronics committee:_

We regret to announce the tragic events which occurred at noon, on the 25th of November, -.

The events leading to this incredible, no horrific, denouement having already been made clear, we have only to say that we made the regrettable decision to hire Mr. Rahvoosh Hud, and that we have no excuse in so doing. Mr. Rahvoosh Hud offered his services, and we accepted…

**Wanted for the abduction of 900 students from Rhombus Hills on the 25th of November, -:**

_One Rahvoosh Hud – about thirty years of age, 200 cm in height, lean in build, physically active and healthy, with dark and striking colouring. Last seen dressed in a distinctive, rainbow-coloured coat and beret._

_**HUD MAKES HEADLINES**_

The disappearance of every student from Rhombus Hills at noon on the 25th of November has made media headlines as **a****national****tragedy.**

All because of one Mr. Pest-Control - without the qualifications.

Mr. Hud was true to his word and "fixed it". Starting from room 117, he visited each computer room in Rhombus Hills, "singing" the computers to life. According to witnesses, the bugs "responded". "They sounded like wasps after someone stumbled on their nest," said Ms. T, one of the Rhombus Hills teachers, "Not a pleasant sound at all." However, according to recent information disclosed by a certain witness, the school refused to pay Mr. Hud for his services, claiming that Mr. Hud's solution "coincided with the –Tronics team resolving the issue _themselves_; thus the –Tronics team, not Mr. Hud, took the credit for finally finding a solution." In short, the computers " woke up " because Mr. Hud _just__happened_ to apply_his_, rather unorthodox, solution to the problem at the same time in which the computer network had been fixed by the team.

Mr. Hud, like any other reasonable human being, retaliated – in an unreasonable way…

_**Supernatural or What?**_

Witnesses describe his voice as "haunting and horrible", "transfixing", "unearthly."

A man single-handedly herding 900 students, out of Rhombus Hills, under the eyes of 50 staff members. With no weapon except his voice.

_Supernatural or what?_

"We couldn't do anything. No one even said anything – or even tried to stop them. We were standing there, and watching, and it was as if his voice made us freeze where we stood," says Ms. T, who witnessed the remarkable 'abduction'. "Mr. Hud just came out into the quadrangle and started singing. And all the students came to him. From every single corner of the school. When they were gone – every last one of them - and we 'woke up', figuratively speaking, it was too late. Once we came to our senses, we had all kinds of search parties going out at once; we called the police as soon as we could, but they couldn't do anything either."

When asked what Hud was singing about, Ms. T told us, "It sounded like he was promising them something if they went with him. Something very great, and very wonderful. Like a never-ending holiday. And for a moment I think I could have gone with him."


End file.
